'This
series is part of the WorkingForChange campaign,
in cooperation with Martin Luther King III of
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
to prevent the theft of the presidential election
of 2004. There is a link included to sign onto
the WorkingForChange/King petition.

The
Harris Touch: Vote Rustling by Computer

One can't sabotage democracy with felon lists
alone. Ballot-eating machines worked well in Gadsden
and other Black counties, but cyberspace offers
even more opportunities for fun and games. This
time, it's "touch screen" voting. No paper trail,
no audit path, no fights over recounts: recounts
are impossible.

Florida, as you might guess, is the first to adopt
this video-game voting technology statewide. Secretary
of State Harris immediately certified the reliability
of one machine, the iVotronic, from Election Systems
and Software of Omaha. On their Web site, there
is a neat demo of their foolproof system you can
try out. I did -- and successfully cast an "over-vote,"
a double vote for one candidate. Then the site
crashed my laptop. But hey, the bugs will be worked
out . . . or worked in. The question is, who else
is touching the touch screen? In the case of the
iVotronics, it's Sandra Mortham. Her name rang
a bell for me. In fact, "Mortham" rang several
alarms. Mortham was Harris's Republican predecessor
as secretary of state. She's the one who first
hired DBT. Now she's iVotronics representative
in Florida. And she's a busy lady, also operating,
"Women for Jeb," one of the First Brother's re-election
operations.

[For more on computerized voting, see the commentary
I wrote with ML King III, and then sign the WorkingForChange
petition
to halt the switch to voting Vegas-style.]

The
New American Apartheid: Race and the Bush Brothers

In 2002, in her triumphant run for congress, Harris
told a campaign rally, "Before God, before my
family, before my friends, before my nation, before
the nation, I sleep well at night."

You're thinking, "With whom?" Well, shame
on you. My thoughts were more sobering. Harris
had, after all, effectively admitted in her screed
to my editors at Harper's that she'd aggressively
moved to disenfranchise thousands of innocent
Black folks. Even if she believes she wasn't at
fault, how could she sleep at night? I
suspect she -- and the government and press --
would have been a bit more troubled if the wrongly
purged voters came from country-club membership
rolls: moneyed, important and white.

Don't kid yourself: the color of the excluded
voters had an awful lot to do with why this investigation
was dismissed by the U.S. media for so long. The
"liberal media," as Harris calls them, would never
recognize their own subtle prejudices. Why had
Salon.com, which named the first part of my investigation
their top political story, then lost its nerve
and spiked Part II? The story Salon feared (eventually
published in Nation and Harpers)
centered on Pastor Johnson of Alachua, convicted
in New York and therefore entitled to vote in
Florida. Salon.com killed the story following
doubts raised by of one of their editors. The
preppy white Ivy Leaguer could not understand
why a middle-aged Black man, an ex-con to boot,
did not raise a ruckus in a county office in the
rural South. Why didn't Pastor Johnson pound the
table and demand his voting rights? After all,
voters in Palm Beach had no problems complaining
publicly.

Of the victims I spoke with, the only African
Americans who would agree to talk on camera were
the three clerics, whose collars afforded them
a kind of cultural protection. Alachua County,
Okeechobee this is still the Old South where,
within the memory of many of these people, Black
voters were hanged from trees. The deep, wounding
history of Jim Crow explains the initial quiet
of so many victims of the illegal purge, a caution
echoed and affirmed by the silence of the Democratic
Party. At the beginning of the twenty-first century,
America is back to asking the question we thought
resolved by the 1965 Voting Rights Act: Should
Black people be allowed the vote?

So far, we've discussed only the purge of citizens
illegally barred from voting, most of them
falsely accused of having felony records. Even
if that wrong is righted, a good half a million
Floridians will still be barred from voting, quite
legally under Florida law. And we know their color.
One-third of all Black men in Florida have lost
their right to vote.

And the Bush Brothers like it that way.

Within two months of the 2000 election, President
Bush convened a Bi-BURP, a Bipartisan Blue Ribbon
Panel to recommend reforms to prevent "another
Florida."

Our president, to ensure that we understood clearly
he had no intention whatsoever of heeding his
panel's findings and recommendations, put two
men in charge of the Bi-BURP for whom he has the
fondest disregard: Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
Relieved of the pressure of having to produce
a plan that might be implemented, Carter and Ford
got right to the heart of the matter on the faux
felon purge: race. The former presidents called
for an end to barring the vote to people who have
served their time and gone straight. After all,
only thirteen states hold on to these exclusion
laws, originally passed by Deep South legislatures
after Reconstruction while the Ku Klux Klan's
night riders successfully cleared the voter rolls
by more direct means.

Neither President Bush nor Governor Bush have
bothered with even a false gesture toward implementing
the Carter-Ford call to restore the rights of
these (un-white) citizens. Jeb Bush's reforms
are limited to multi-dollar contracts for the
Mortham-matic touch screens.

Fair
Use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material
the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding
of environmental, political, economic, democratic, domestic and international
issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted
material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.